August 8, 2003

When Publishers Pay Professors to Adopt Textbooks

To the Editor:

Thomas Bartlett makes several important points in his article ("Selling Out: a Textbook Example," June 27), but unfortunately he conflates two separate issues. There are, of course, ethical problems when professors choose textbooks based on payments from publishers. The same is true when professors assign their own books to their students, knowing that they will receive royalties on those copies.

However, those situations are very different from the case of a

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